UPDATE: See the page of practice suggestions for more on this! Someone on the internet asked me to explain what Roy Haynes is doing on the Chick Corea tune Windows, from the album Now He […]
Category: ECM
Vashkar
The other day I listed some often-played tunes that had some kind of an mystique, at least in my mind. Here’s a tune that nobody ever plays, with a lot of mystique. Apropos of nothing— […]
Transcription: Jack Dejohnette – Timeless
Biggest longest transcription we’ve done here in some time. This is Jack Dejohnette playing on Timeless, another essential recording by John Abercrombie. Jan Hammer also appears. I got my copy of this album at Rasputin’s […]
Figure Control: 4/4 – Nexus riff
Let’s do one of these for the rhythm in the Nexus practice loop. You’ll recall, with this Funk Control / Figure Control series what I do is take a single performance rhythm and put a […]
Practice loop: Nexus
Practice loop in 4/4, sampled from Nexus by Gateway— a trio of John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, and Jack Dejohnette, that put out a couple of records in the 70s, and again in the 90s. This […]
New Joel Rothman title
In the mail I just received a new book by Joel Rothman: Drumming Outside The Box – for Rock & Jazz. It’s basically a library of patterns focused around creating an unbroken rhythm on the […]
2-3-4 Method
With today’s “2-3-4” method, I’m getting into the “give your practice idea a name so people will remember it and treat it like it’s a thing” racket. This is a pretty easy method for use […]
Todd’s methods: Reed with RB and BR
Playing Latin styles, you end up using a lot of sticking combinations of RB and BR— B meaning both hands together— so here’s a basic way of using Ted Reed’s Syncopation to work on that. […]
Transcription: Jon Christensen — Keep It Like That- Tight
Here’s Jon Christensen doing some nice open, dynamic playing on a slow, static vamp: Keep It Like That — Tight from Terje Rypdal’s self-titled album on ECM from 1971. We love Christensen because he’s a […]
DBMITW: trove o’ Burton
I’ve been listening to a lot of Gary Burton lately— like the past five months or so— but haven’t been sharing much because there’s a shortage of his recorded stuff on YouTube, except for this […]
Several ideas in 5/4
Nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but this came up today while I was working on Mevlevia, an ECM-type tune in a moderate 5. I’ve taken some basic patterns in 5/8, and applied them to a usable […]
More Stick Control in 5/4
Another way of using Stick Control in 5/4 came up in my practicing recently, as I was working on Mevlevia. What I’ve done is change the rhythm to three beats of 8th notes and two […]